Are AI tool directories worth it?
What a directory listing actually gives you, what the launch directories we catalogue really cost, and the three cases where submitting is a waste of an afternoon. Written by a directory, about directories.
Updated 7 August 2026
We run one of these, so treat everything below with the suspicion it deserves. What makes it worth reading anyway is that none of it is an estimate: the costs come from 13 launch directories we read against their own pages by hand, and the numbers about this site come from its database rather than from a marketing meeting.
There is one thing we cannot tell you, and it is the thing you want most. We do not know how much traffic a listing will send you. Nobody who publishes a figure knows either — every traffic and domain-rating number on a launch directory's pricing page is self-reported by the site selling you the listing, which is why our catalogue of them quotes those claims as claims and stores none of them as fact.
What a listing actually gives you
Strip out the promises and three things are left, all of which are checkable before you submit.
A page that indexes
A listing is a page about your product on a domain that is not yours, usually with a link back. Whether that link passes anything depends on whether it is do-follow, which most directories do not say. Of the 13 we catalogue, the link type is published for only a few — the rest are recorded as unknown because guessing would be worse than admitting it.
A day of concentrated attention, or none
Directories that run a launch board — a leaderboard with a date on it — give you one day where your product is in front of people who came specifically to look at new products. Directories that are simply catalogues give you an entry that sits there. Both can be worth having; only the first is a launch, and only the first is worth clearing your calendar for.
A forcing function
This one is underrated and it is free. Submitting forces you to write a tagline in 60 characters and a description under 600, choose at most 3 categories, and produce a logo and a screenshot that hold up next to strangers' products. Most founders discover their positioning is vague at exactly this moment. Our listing checklist is the same exercise without the submission.
What it actually costs
Of the 13 directories in our catalogue, 12 publish a price on their own site. The remaining 1 do not, and one of them — BetaList — puts the submission flow behind a sign-in, so you cannot learn the cost without an account.
The range is wide. Futurepedia, the most expensive we found, publishes this: “Verified Listing $497 one-time. The $247 Basic Listing was marked "(Sold Out)" when checked. Enterprise packages are custom-priced.” Several others are free, with a real price paid in time rather than money.
3 of the 13 ask for a backlink or badge on your own site as a condition of the free tier. That is a real cost and worth naming: you are giving a link from your domain in exchange for a link from theirs, and on a young site your outbound links are not free.
The free tiers with a queue are the ones to read carefully, and the wait is where they differ most. Fazier says of its free plan:
“The free Basic plan requires "A backlink to our site … (on your homepage or footer)" and is "Reviewed & listed within 30 days". Lite and Premium state "No backlink required" but publish no turnaround.”
Twelve Tools says of its:
“The free tier requires "A backlink to our site … (on your homepage or footer)" and is "Reviewed within 72 hours". Pro drops the backlink requirement and is "Reviewed and listed within 24 hours".”
Both are quoted from their own pages, and the rest of what they say is on the directories page.
When it is not worth it
Three cases, and they are common.
- You have nothing anybody can use yet. Hacker News says it more plainly than anyone: “"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with", "ideally without barriers such as signups or emails". Blog posts, sign-up pages and newsletters are explicitly off topic, new features are usually not substantive enough, and "Please don't ask friends to upvote or comment."” A landing page with a waitlist behind it fails that test, and it fails the equivalent unwritten test everywhere else for the same reason.
- You are submitting to all of them in one afternoon. The marginal value of the twentieth directory is close to zero, and the cost is the same hour each time. Pick the few whose audience is yours.
- You are buying the listing to buy the outcome. Paid tiers on every directory we read — including this one — buy queue position, placement or speed. None of them buys the audience caring. If the free version of a listing would do nothing for you, the $49 version does nothing faster.
So: worth it?
The concrete next step is either getting your page ready before you submit anywhere — our audit runs 6 checks on it for free and tells you what is missing in its own words — or reading what each of the 13 directories asks for before you spend the afternoon.
When you are ready, submit here. It is free, we ask for nothing in return, and there are currently 155 listings across 31 categories you can look through first to see what a good one looks like.
One rule we hold ourselves to on every page of this site: no invented traffic figures, no case studies we cannot show you, and no number that was not read off a database or quoted from somebody's own page. If you find one, it is a bug.